Chapter 37
There are a lot of ways to describe Team Z.
Criminals? Without a doubt.
Idiots? In double measure.
Depraved, vulgar perverts who've elevated the topic of dicks to something approaching a religion? You bet.
But what's genuinely great about my unusual colleagues — these ex-cons, felons, and horny lunatics — is this:
They love to fight. And they fight especially hard for their own, for whoever's been let into something resembling their circle, however loose that circle might be.
So the moment some idiot brought a pool cue down on Robert's head, even Flambe — who never missed a chance to bust the guy's balls — immediately hurled a fireball into the cluster of thugs gathered around the body of our poor dispatcher, who'd already become part of the crew, even if none of them quite thought of it that way yet.
"Here comes the heat!" Kolm spun on his heels, drove his fist straight into the nearest bar patron's groin, and without a second thought charged forward — throwing bone-crunching uppercuts at anyone whose cybernetic implants glowed red.
And there were plenty of those. The bar had essentially divided itself into three unequal parts.
Team Z, charging into a fight against a superior enemy with battle cries and grins on their faces.
Random civilians, scrambling in every direction, desperately trying to avoid getting caught in the crossfire.
And members of the Red Ring, every one of them sporting a signature scarlet implant. Plenty of them were ordinary people whose devices let them go toe-to-toe with weaker supers. But there were no shortage of powered villains in the mix either, since the toys belonging to Veil — the head of this whole operation — boosted their already considerable strength to another level.
A few of Coupe's daggers flew past me, burying themselves in the bodies of men crashing backwards to the floor. The former assassin herself followed close behind, executing a horrifying blend of martial arts and ballet — leaving a trail of blood she practically bathed in.
"Ha… ha… ha…" Golem absorbed a nearby chair into his arm, broke it down into components somewhere inside his body, and fashioned something like brass knuckles around his fist. Then he launched a pair of suicidal attackers who'd rushed him into the wall. They blew straight through it and out onto the road beyond. Only one of them got back up. "Coffins just got more expensive!"
"Come here, cupcake." Mel smoothly cupped my face in her hands and pressed an absolutely scorching, hungry kiss to my lips. Then she winked and backhanded some poor bastard who'd been creeping up behind me into unconsciousness. "Whoever takes down more people gets to be on top next time!"
Without waiting for my answer, the demoness opened a portal beneath herself and dropped straight into the thickest knot of enemies, swinging her demonic blade left and right. The sword didn't care about protection, about other people's powers, about armor — Mel's strikes were simply so devastating that they sent enormous men flying in all directions.
"Guess I'll have to put in some effort…" I raised my palms and drenched a cluster of Red Ring members with water, then spread my arms wide — wrapping around the poor bastards from every angle and pulling them toward the floor. The water moved like something alive, throwing itself at them, trying to drown them, to choke them with twisting tendrils that forced their way into every opening.
Even I had to admit it looked unsettling from the outside. I hadn't seen that kind of fear in someone's eyes in a long time.
The bar had descended into pure chaos. Constantly shifting, frantic fights where opponents swapped and cycled like some deranged dance.
Music started up from the karaoke stage, and a burst of familiar bright light told me exactly who had decided this was the perfect moment to sing.
Several copies of Prism launched into a provocative, obscene dance — shaking their considerable assets and gliding across the stage in perfect sync, hitting every beat.
Beneath me, enough liquid had already pooled to work with, so I needed to move before my darling wiped out the majority of the Red Ring on her own.
Timing it with the rising swell in Prism's song, I flung my palms outward and lifted everything I'd gathered. A sphere of liquid — water that had mixed with blood, spilled booze, and even pulled from the tap behind the bar — swelled up in the center of the room all at once.
Tentacles shot out from it in every direction, dragging thugs inward, where I met each of them with good old-fashioned punches — technique courtesy of Amanda and a few others who'd taken the time to teach me properly.
The first one to fly in my direction took a fist to the gut, a jet of water spat in his face, and a follow-up to the head that put him down cold. But the girl who came tumbling in right after him was a hell of a lot quicker.
She twisted away from my strike, shifted into a humanoid cheetah, and very nearly raked her claws across my throat — except a burst of water shot from my palm considerably faster than she could land her blow.
The jet punched through the dome and sent her hurtling the length of the room, taking out a couple of enemies who'd been piling onto Sonar in the process.
Sonar gave me a grateful nod, then shifted into his larger form and — straight out of a horror film — launched himself at the ceiling before diving down onto another thug who'd been beating our dispatcher.
Seizing the window while his recent enemy was busy being torn apart by Sonar's massive claws, Robert sprinted forward, leapt onto Armstrong's back, and jammed a pair of darts he'd grabbed along the way straight into the man's cheek.
But I didn't get to see how the fight between Diva, the dispatcher, and their short-armed opponent played out.
The roof caved in as Flambe's fire-wreathed silhouette came crashing through it. Grappling with some guy who was spraying ice shards in every direction, our most abrasive colleague drove the man headfirst into a wooden support column and, without bothering to pace himself, began pouring fire all over his icy counterpart.
I looked away from the spectacle — no, the more honest way to put it is that the idiot forced me to throw my arms up over my face to keep my eyebrows from getting singed off.
The fire nearly started to spread, which meant I had to drop the water dome and douse the growing blaze instead.
Pain flared across my back. The constant liquid shell I was maintaining barely caught a blade wreathed in blue flame. I rolled sideways and, holding nothing back, started firing water rounds from my fingertips. The room filled quickly with the thunderclap of bursting water shots, and the bastard who'd jumped me went sprawling on his back, his face flushing a deep, spreading blue.
Mel burst out of a nearby portal. She hit the floor back-first, wrestling with a bizarre man who looked like a walking corpse — he kept reaching for her throat, not even flinching at the damage she was dealing him.
A water whip wrapped around his head with centimeters to spare from that crimson skin, and that was enough. The demoness headbutted him, crunching dead flesh, then neatly pulled her legs up and sent him flying with one hard shove.
Without a word, she got to her feet and offered me her clawed hand. The sight of her was so captivating that the moment I stood up, I couldn't stop myself.
I pulled her in by the waist, and at her first surprised exhale, brought her in for a kiss.
Currents of water spun around us. Mel's grip tightened on her sword. Her tail twitched back and forth with restless energy.
Shouts. Explosions. The crash of splintering furniture and crumbling walls. And in the middle of all of it, we stood pressing our foreheads together, not looking away from each other.
"Playing dirty, cupcake…" Mel's eyes slid toward the water current, which had already hammered a couple more stragglers into the wall. A fierce, hungry grin spread across her face, and she broke free of my grip and opened a new portal, pausing just long enough to promise: "You'll pay for that…"
---
The fight lasted at least another couple of minutes, and by the time it was over, we'd thoroughly destroyed the bar.
Water up to our ankles. Bodies scattered here and there. Scorched walls, every piece of furniture reduced to scrap, and I won't even get into the mountains of broken glass from every shattered bottle. That last detail was also responsible for the overwhelming reek of alcohol that hung over everything — strong enough to drown out the usual perfume of a proper bloody brawl: blood, shit, and vomit.
The grand finale of our lively evening was a rather thorough beating administered to Armstrong, in which every member of Team Z participated.
His mechanical arms had been smashed to pieces. One hung above the bar counter, the other swung uselessly like a limp, elderly appendage, throwing off the occasional feeble spark.
Both of his real arms, small as they were, had been broken in several places — badly enough that healing and rehab would take the better part of six months.
And most importantly, beyond the hole in his cheek, the bastard had also acquired a large, jagged wound from my water jet along his thigh. And good old Kolm had turned his balls into something resembling a fried egg.
We didn't linger in what remained of Sardines. Instead, we bolted as a group — exactly like a pack of teenagers caught red-handed, far more afraid of their parents than of the police or any consequences.
So, half an hour and a couple of kilometers later, we'd planted ourselves in the only late-night diner we could find. Some kind of Mexican place, though as Diva put it perfectly:
"It's all the same crap, just stacked in different orders and drowned in different sauces, so eat what you're given."
And we ate. We had to pool our money, though, because poor Robert's wallet had fallen out during the fight and every bill had gotten completely soaked. The cashier refused to accept anything damp and saturated with a mixture of blood, water, and booze.
The battle-ready Indian guy had actually grabbed a frying pan when we walked in. Funny — and I realize this sounds racist — but I always figured they were more of a call-center crowd than a diner crowd.
Beaten up, nursing minor wounds and the first creep of a hangover, we sat at the outdoor tables and silently worked our way through tacos and the rest of the junk we'd bought in a hurry.
"Heh." My quiet laugh drew the attention of Sonar and Mel, who were sitting on either side of me. "Just surprised that Diva was actually right… about the tacos. And she loves being wrong."
"Hey." A half-eaten burrito came flying at my head and nearly smeared itself across my forehead. "You wet your noodle in devil juice a couple of times and suddenly you've got jokes?"
"Heh-heh-heh." Not answering, just smirking even more insufferably, I caught the next burrito and — right in front of Diva, who clearly expected it back — simply unwrapped it and started eating. "I couldn't be bothered to get up. Thanks."
"Asshole." The invisibility user snorted under her breath, rolled her eyes with exhausted resignation, though she squeezed out a smile anyway. "Fine… tonight was too good an evening, so I'm going to pretend I didn't hear any of that."
"That's it?"
"What, you want me to jerk you off in the parking lot?" She laughed, mirroring my grin, and nodded gratefully as Mel passed her a fresh taco through a portal. "You can forget it."
"All of this is very sweet, really, but…" Flambe was using his power to reheat food that had gone cold and passing it along like a seasoned short-order cook — working the table where I sat with Malefica and Sonar. "What happens next?"
"Home, probably?" Golem's deep bass carried an unusual note of disappointment. The big man stared at the floor for a few seconds, then turned to Robert directly. "Next time you want to pick a fight — give some warning. I wanted more to drink."
"Ha." Robert tilted his head back and delivered what could only be described as a genuinely inspirational line, completely deadpan. "You're heroes now. Heroes don't fight. They just win."
"Ohhhh!" Everyone reacted at once. Some people threw up their hands. Prism actually chucked an empty plastic cup in Robert's direction, begging him to stop.
"The Red Ring aren't exactly easy to beat, though." Mel pressed a cup of soda into my hands and carefully ran her fingers through my hair before leaning in to scan my face and body for any wounds. "And what kind of name is that anyway? The Red Ring?"
"Sounds like somebody has prostate problems…" Victor tossed a handful of fried potatoes into his mouth with the blankest expression imaginable, then turned to me. "You remember the guy in the cell next to ours? Guy named Zach?"
"The one they called Pillow?"
"Yeah."
"What's he got to do with — wait." I snapped my fingers in the air, thoroughly distracted by the demoness's attention and quickly losing my train of thought, which required genuine effort to recover. "So they didn't call him Pillow because of, like… gay stuff? Like he liked lying under guys?"
"Nah." A few bits of potato fell out of Victor's mouth, but he displayed true Harvard-level refinement by acting like that was perfectly normal. "He had this enormous hemorrhoid that literally prevented him from sitting down — even on his bed. A real crown, that thing."
"Damn. Poor bastard. Rough luck." Every man at the table expressed immediate solidarity, while the women rolled their eyes and laughed at our reactions.
"Boys, maybe you save the intimate medical details for your little men's circle, yeah?" Diva loudly slurped her cola, and just like that, the conversation snapped back to serious territory far too quickly.
"Speaking of the Red Ring…"
"The Anal Ring."
"You've got some kind of history with them, Mr. Dispatcher?" Prism ignored Golem's comment and sent a stream of sweet smoke drifting toward the clay-bodied man. "They seemed awfully determined to get their hands on you."
"More like put me in the ground." Kolm cracked his knuckles against his palm and scanned the group. His eyes met each of ours in turn. The big man was silently asking all of us something like permission to voice the question that had been sitting with everyone since Robert first joined the team. No one objected. Even I was genuinely curious to find out who our dispatcher really was — and it had nothing to do with money or the bet. "It's obvious your whole identity is a cover. So. Who are you actually?"
For nearly a full minute, the diner fell quiet. Everyone traded glances, making sure not to let Robert drift out of their line of sight. And Robert himself —
He stared at the ground for a few seconds. Then, just before he made his decision, the dispatcher glanced over at Diva. Whatever he found in her expression gave him what he needed. He stood up from his seat and delivered a speech.
"Robert is just a guy… A mask I put on, along with this office-drone shirt — the kind of guy who fantasizes about muffins with his coffee and leaving his phone on silent on Sundays." He took a few steps toward us and positioned himself where the light from the streetlamp fell directly on him. Very theatrical. "But what I actually want is to get back into the fight. To do the one thing I know how to do better than anything else…"
People were listening. Most of them, anyway. The revelation was getting closer, and without realizing it I leaned forward, wanting to know who our dispatcher really was. Most of the team was no better. Sonar had his fists clenched, as if hoping his guess would turn out to be right — though I'd like to believe he was just anxious the way I was.
Mel couldn't have cared less. She hadn't even hidden her own name, so other people's secrets interested her only in passing — fine for stirring up trouble and winning a bet, but all this mystery and drama was another thing entirely. So the demoness sat there like she was at the movies, kept drinking her cola, and just lightly ran her hand along my shoulders and back.
"…I never told you who I am because… you're all starting to grow on me. Whether the real me grows on you — that's still an open question." Robert drew a breath and looked at each of us in turn — pausing, for some reason, on me and Flambe — then continued. "But if I want this team to actually be something, I have to trust you. So I'll come clean… um."
Like a man standing at the edge of a diving board, he tensed up completely, gripping his fists tight, holding his breath. He closed his eyes for just a moment, and when the lids opened again, Robert gave us the answer to our most pressing question in a single unbroken exhale.
"I'm Mechaman."
"Holy shit."
If You Like The Story Drop a Review
~Read Advanced Chapters on: p@treon/Amiii_
~Every 150 PS = Bonus Chapter!
~Push the Story forward with your [Power Stones]